'Lightness = Godliness' in Toyota’s Midship Runabout

In keeping with its design philosophy, the MR-S has a straightforward cabin with familiar Toyota switchgear – with the exception of an incredibly hip hugging set of Recaro sports seats. It feels as though the Recaros mould themselves to your body, as you sink in and sit very low in the chassis – all the better to feel exactly what the car’s doing. Out on the road, and especially through the corners, the seats are brilliant as they hold you firmly in place. However, at a stop light you’re certainly aware of the fact that you’re sitting lower than most other forms of unruly traffic on our roads. On the whole, though, the driving position is excellent as you face a centrally mounted tachometer, and sit well within reach of a three-spoke steering wheel, short gearshift and aluminum pedals.

You will, however, have to learn to pack light since there’s actually very little luggage space in the car. The MR-S has a small storage bin behind the front seats, and another one under the bonnet – both of which could just about hold a small bag or two at the very most. But then a sports car such as this isn’t meant to cater to your every practical need – it’s not exactly suited for the school run. It’s meant, instead, to put a smile on your face when you’re out on a twisty road, and you’ve left the kids safely at home.

It takes only a few moments behind the drivers’ seat of the MR-S to begin to feel that all is well with the world – a nicely dialed in sports cars can have the affect on you. And to top it all, it was a brilliant winters’ evening in Delhi – probably one of the few occasions where you can actually enjoy alfresco motoring. Although, as Murphy’s law would have it, as soon as I put the top down, it started drizzling – it almost felt as though we were in the UK.

The engine in the MR-S, with just about 140 horsepower, isn’t meant to blow you away, but it’s certainly enough to keep you interested. In fact, the same engine has never felt anywhere near as good in a Corolla. The exhaust note isn’t brilliant – it could be much more engaging – and the small single exhaust poking out from under the rear bumper isn’t very sports car like either, but none of that matters once you fling the MR-S around a corner.

Mid engined cars have a reputation for being tricky at the limit, they’re said to be quick to rotate if the grip levels are breached, but that’s certainly not the case with the MR-S. As with most cars these days – even a pure mid-engined sports car like the Porsche Boxster – the MR-S has a lot of default understeer dialed into its chassis setup. So it tends to understeer or run wide on turn in. The steering is extremely light because it doesn’t have to contend with the weight of an engine up front, but the car’s still incredibly communicative courtesy of a brilliant chassis and its inconsiderable weight. Being mid engined, the MR-S tends to rotate nicely if you stay on the power – all the while feeding you a running stream of information about exactly which tire has grip and which doesn’t. It’s sheer bliss! And it really does make you wonder why you need any more from a car – why aren’t all cars small, light, agile and playful such as this?

The MR-S is road going proof of the soundness of the mid-engined layout, which should never really be in question anyway since all hypercars and Formula race cars share this configuration – it really is a very balanced chassis. Extracting power from the engine isn’t difficult either, courtesy of a very slick 5-speed manual gearbox that has short shifts with true rifle bolt precision. In fact, the only car I can think of that has a nicer gearbox is another sports car, the gold standard for great gearshifts, the Honda S2000. Despite being light and a convertible, the chassis in the MR-S feels well put together and reasonably stiff – aided by the multiple braces in the engine bay.

At the end of the day, the MR-S is everything a sports car should be: it’s nimble and light; it’s communicative and playful; it’s powerful enough to enjoy yourself, and yet it doesn’t require you to reach illegal speeds to do so.

Verdict

It’s a great shame that Toyota doesn’t make the MR2, or an equivalent sports car, anymore. And given the current economic climate, as well as the environmental issues facing the planet, it’s not likely that they’ll develop a car like this in the immediate future. The real shame, of course, is that no one else makes a car like this (or plans to import one) for the Indian market. So if you can afford an Audi TT or Porsche Boxster, you’re okay. But if you can’t, you’re out of luck. The MR-S proves that a fundamentally sound, lightweight, relatively inexpensive, sports car can be just as much fun, if not more, than something that costs twice as much.

Surely there’s enough of a market for a car like this in India today for a manufacturer to seriously give it some thought. It would be too much to ask Mazda, who reinvented the British sports car with their Miata in the early 90s (they even added reliability to the mix), to enter the Indian market just to bring us an affordable sports car. But is it really too much to ask of the various car manufactures in the country to give us an affordable, fun to drive runabout (midship or otherwise)?